In a previous post, we investigated the sampling coverage on a Samsung Galaxy S10e Android version 10, SDK level 29. The goal was to investigate if the location measure (and other related measures) were collected while the app was in the background.
A question came up; does it work for activity recognition also – i.e. for the activity measure? The answer is yes. As shown in the figure below, activity is recognised and reported during a full day of use (07:00 to 19:00).
Since activity recognition is event-based, there is no “ground truth”, and the coverage rate (0..1) is hence irrelevant for the activity measure. However, looking into the data, we see that activities are recognised. For example, during 07:00-09:00 a lot of walking and biking is taking place, and similarly during 16:00-17:00. This pretty much reflects the day of the test subject 🙂 .
So – in conclusion; activity recognition seems to run also when the app is in the background.